Arliss Howard

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Dr. Bennet Omalu is a pathologist who loves his job and, in many ways, the patients that he looks after. His methods are his own but they work for him and he's very successful at his job. When ex-American Football star Mike Webster turns up on his morticians table, Omalu treats his body just like he would any other. What isn't initially known to Omalu is that after years of playing professional football Webster had become something of a recluse whilst suffering with Dementia and depression.

Bennet's initial findings with the late Mr Webber is that he died of cardiac arrest, but unhappy with this conclusion, the pathologist begins to dig deeper. Looking at every possible outcome, Bennet beings to study the brain of the ex-footballer and what he discovers is a new disease that hasn't been seen before.

Before this point, people knew about a condition called Punch Drunk, a disorder often associated with contact sport such as boxing, but up until Dr. Bennet Omalu's discovery the disorder hadn't been seen as a physical effect.

Adapting Audrey Niffenegger's wonderfully complex novel to the screen can't have been easy, but Rubin (Ghost) has written a thoroughly engaging film. The heavy emotional tone makes it feel a bit girly, but it's still a terrific story.Henry (Bana) has time-travelled since the night his mother (Nolden) died in a car crash. He can't control his "trips", although he seems to go to places with an emotional resonance. When he first meets Clare (McAdams), she's in her 30s and has known him since she was 6 (Proulx). As a result of this paradox, their relationship develops very differently for each of them. Eventually they find friends (Livingston and McLean) who are in on Henry's condition. And a doctor (Tobolowsky) who may be able to help.Director Schwentke invests the film with a lush visual style that circles around the characters as they try to make sense of their life together. Subtle effects and clever editing work extremely well, even if Mychael Danna's music is a little too insistently weepy. And while the premise presents Henry's condition as something like epilepsy, the film can hardly help but start feeling like a terminal illness drama, as signs of impending tragedy start to appear.Bana is good in what's essentially a thankless role. The script doesn't offer him much personality beyond earnestness, so Bana plays him as a nice guy just trying to muddle through. Opposite him, McAdams is a wonderful breath of fresh air, really capturing Clare's steely resolve and quiet pain. Livingston and Tobolowsky are also extremely good in far too few scenes.There's definitely the sense that this film is edited down from a richer, more detailed novel. One problem is that Henry's ageing is far too subtle, so we're never quite sure which time he's travelling from (see Christopher Nolan's Memento or, better yet, Following, for how to do this well). And although we notice loose threads and missing scenes, the editors have done a remarkable job of making such a fragmented tale hold together both emotionally and logically.

And in the end, the film compellingly explores the nature of relationships while quietly moving us to all kinds of tears.

Surprising, really, that "anesthetic awareness" -- helpless, immobile and, it should be noted, very rare consciousness during surgery -- hasn't been explored in a thriller before. Or maybe it has and I don't remember; that would explain why Awake sounds so novel but feels so familiar. In Joby Harold's film, young millionaire Clay Beresford (Hayden Christensen) is undergoing a risky heart transplant operation when he realizes the anesthetic isn't working as it should -- he is completely and silently paralyzed, but continues to hear and feel everything around him. If the movie wanted to top itself, it could find a way for Christensen to transfer immediately from anesthetic awareness into catalepsy, and maybe knock off Poe's "Premature Burial." Unfortunately and despite its killer gimmick, Awake isn't consumed with that kind of B-movie zeal.

Clay, like so many men before him, tries to block out the pain by intense concentration on thoughts of Jessica Alba (playing his girlfriend Sam -- though oddly enough, Clay's strongest memories reveal nothing more explicit than Alba's demurely exposed back). His focus breaks down when he overhears some, shall we say, less than reassuring words from his doctors, and from there a trapped Clay races against time, desperately attempting to alert Sam and/or his possessive mother (Lena Olin) of the danger he's in.

The best movie ever made about the American experience in Vietnam happens to have been filmed by an American expatriate living in Britain. Stanley Kubrick's war masterpiece is split into two parts, and it's the first that is laser-engraved into the psyche of any film fan. R. Lee Ermey has never (and will never) be able to shake the role of the uber-demanding sergeant, and Matthew Modine and Vincent D'Onofrio turn in career-making performances as well. Written tautly to the point where it's impossible to look away, this harrowing look at the war -- and what the experience was like for the troops before they ever set foot on foreign soil -- is unmatched in the genre.

With his highly anticipated Jurassic Park sequel, Steven Spielberg grubs through the filmmaking archives for every plot device, camera trick, and clichéd scene you can think of, and rolls it into one big mess. Only with dinosaurs. Lots of 'em!

Based on a short story collection by Mississippi writer Larry Brown, Big Bad Love is a collage of the "hard country life", following the drunken routines of Leon Barlow (Arliss Howard).

Leon is a shiftless alcoholic, though obviously still a talented writer with his mixture of adjective clauses and ability to envelop anyone around him into an environment he is describing. He's separated from his wife (Debra Winger) with whom he had two children, and he has difficulty playing the part of father, even as he tries to win back his ex-wife's affections.

"Birth" opens with a scene of surprising emotional magnitude that is driven entirely by its score. Instantly and viscerally evocative, the elaborate orchestration -- which plays over a long tracking shot following an anonymous jogger through Central Park during a beautifully moody snowfall -- is a curious, captivating combination of flute, triangle, French horn and (quite startlingly) tympani that has an uplift and an ominousness at the same time.

This gripping music, by the brilliant Alexandre Desplat ("Girl With a Pearl Earring"), does all the work in this scene until the man -- seemingly young and healthy from behind, which is all we see of him -- pauses suddenly, then collapses under a bridge.

The next scene takes place 10 years later. The jogger's widow, Anna (played by a serious, sophisticated, melancholy, unabashedly pushing-40 yet intriguingly elfin Nicole Kidman) is about to get married again, to Joseph (subtle, pensive Danny Huston), a man who is really more a hopelessly devoted dear friend than he is a lover. Soon after their engagement party, a somber 10-year-old boy (Cameron Bright) sneaks into their grand Park Avenue apartment and refuses to leave. "You're my wife," he tells Kidman. "It's me -- Sean."

"Map of the World" is a slice-of-life tale of emotional anguish that gives the capable, wonderful Sigourney Weaver her first truly challenging role in ages.

As a once unflappable rural wife facing overwhelming calamity when a neighbor's daughter drowns in her backyard pond, Weaver offers up an oddly droll but moving depiction of the pressures and joys of ordinary motherhood, fallen under a very dark cloud.

Riddled with guilt and self-loathing, Alice (Weaver) retires to bed for days at a time. She neglects her own two girls and leaves managing the household to her neglectful but hard-working, farmer husband (David Strathairn). Then, as if she's being tested on a Biblical scale, misfortune strikes again: A temperamental child at the elementary school where she's a nurse invents misguided charges of molestation against her.